


perfectly normal, thank you very much

by ghostking (damnedtreasure)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Behavior, Character Study, Gen, Vernon Dursley gets his due, harry gets a positive adult influence, healing and growth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29146863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnedtreasure/pseuds/ghostking
Summary: Magic stole away Petunia Dursley's sister, and she has never forgiven that crime.No human is perfect, but everyone is capable of growth, of making a choice.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	perfectly normal, thank you very much

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort of spin-off for a larger AU, exploring quite a few things, the main of which exploring what might happen if Harry had an adult really and truly looking out for him. A lot of things happen in this AU, so many that if I ever get around to actually writing it, it’ll take a while.  
> It’s a character study in a universe _very_ far removed from canon, where an old friend of Lily’s encounters Harry the summer before he gets onto the Express for the first time, and asks some questions. Petunia doesn’t care about this friend’s name, but her name is Wren, and she’s married to a lovely lady named Alyssa, and I’ve rubbed my little queer, trans hands all over JKR’s world. Trans women are women, trans men are men, nonbinary people are nonbinary people, and queer love is love. The world is a massive and gorgeous place, and western british ideals are not universal or without flaw.  
> Title from the opening line of Philosopher's Stone  
> This fic has been converted for free using [AOYeet!](https://aoyeet.space)

Magic stole away Petunia Dursley's sister, and she has never forgiven that crime.

She is bitter, for the lack of Lily. Her sister was always the more hopeful of them, the optimism to Petunia's cynicism. But she still found love, fell in love with a man who was kind to her, and stood up to her parents when they criticized her for not being like Lily (so successful, already married and with a job, a _miracle_.) He was kind to her, and even though he wasn’t rich like Lily’s husband, he worked hard at his job and was well-off enough to support her. He promised her a house with a yard and a nursery and a kitchen, and that was enough.

She had a son, a beautiful baby boy, her own little miracle, who she adored more than anything in the world. She swore that Magic would never touch him, never steal him away where she could not follow.

Magic stole away her sister one final time, killing her. All that magic, and still it couldn’t save her sister.

The son lived while the mother died, and he looked like that damned husband who stole her sister away, but the boy had her chin and eyes that just kept staring up at her.

Grief hurt, and if it weren’t for her son, her baby boy… She pushed down her feelings, all her feelings about the Potters and continued on. She despised Magic, and no word of it would be tolerated under her roof. Not in her home would she allow even one single more family member to be stolen away with sparkling words about pretty magic only to be undone by it.

She… She knew it was not right to treat a child how she and Vernon treated the boy. She knew this somewhere still. If she thought about treating her precious Dudley that way… so she didn’t.

She did nothing.

Inaction earns condemnation just as much as action does.

When the boy comes home from wherever he is when she tells him to get out from underfoot and brings with him a woman in a sleek and professional blouse and skirt, Petunia is wary.

The woman says she is one of Lily’s friends from school.

Petunia remembers Lily coming home trailing a terror of a girl with brown hair and freckles and a smile to rival Lily’s in its brightness. She remembers refusing to use this interloper’s name out of spite, but she knows it, just as she knows the name of every piece of magic that stole her sister.

Snape, Flitwick, _orchideous_ , Hogwarts, The Standard Book of Spells, OWLs, NEWTs, James, _Wren_.

And now one of _them_ has returned, knocking oh-so-politely on her door but entering unannounced and uninvited into her home. Once again they trespass, after stealing away the brightness and the light, the optimism to her cynicism. Again, when they have stolen so much from her, when they let it all get _snuffed out_. How dare they, how dare they come _back_ after letting her die. All that pretty magic and those sparkling words and still they let her die in a war Petunia had never even heard of. Every time they have come with their magic, it has been to steal. With a letter in hand when Petunia was 12, and again with a letter in a bundle of blankets when she was 22, and _now again_.

Again they come, and Petunia does not have her sister to temper her. She is cold, and bitter, and she refuses to allow one single more theft, not even for the boy with the Evans family eyes she cannot bear to meet.

The woman meets her eyes, and asks why her nephew sleeps in a cupboard on a crib mattress, and Petunia is silent.

Inaction is as much a condemnation as action is.

She knows. She refused to stand. She did not speak when Vernon, the man she fell in love with, got tired of being woken in the night by a baby’s cries for a mother who could no longer answer them, and put the crib in the cupboard. She did not risk love and livelihood to prevent it. She said nothing. She knows.

Lily’s friend looks her in the eyes and looks disappointed. She asks if Petunia will try to stop her.

Petunia says nothing.

When the woman commandeers the second bedroom, she says nothing and stands by the door in the hallway, watching.

The woman spells the bedroom clear, and Petunia can hear a thud in Dudley’s room that speaks of where the mess has been relocated.

She waves a wand and mutters spells and a mattress appears, a bookshelf, a desk, a bedside table, a dresser. Pillows and blankets too, in forest greens and trees, before she goes to the bookshelf and books appear from thin air. Children’s novels, and non-Magical ones she has banned from the house for containing magic, alongside ones so clearly Magical it makes her itch. This woman appeared and spelled into existence more literature than has been in this house since they moved in. Complicated books, of course, will just confuse Dudley, who will grow up strong like his father who didn’t need all that crap in those books.

Petunia says nothing.

The boy asks where everything is coming from, and the woman tells him she can afford new ones, and her wife has been badgering her to remodel the guest room anyways.

The room gets a makeover. The walls are cleaned and painted over in a second’s time, the floor scrubbed, the drapes mended and dyed to match, the lamps brightened; a room re-done with the flick of a wand as if it weren’t weeks of work.

A lock is affixed to the inside of the door.

Petunia says nothing.

The woman flashes magic at a rock from her pocket and gives it to the boy. She says that if he needs anything, even a friend to talk to, to hold it and say her name and she will come. She’ll visit too, of course, but just in case.

The woman turns to Petunia.

“Petunia Dursley. Harry is under my protection. I will visit before September, to ensure his safety. I am telling you this three times, Petunia Dursley: if he is harmed, you will answer to me.”

She stares and there is ice in her eyes.

Petunia says nothing.

“Do you understand?”

Petunia nods.

Lily’s friend—as sharp and bright as Lily was, an unwelcome trespasser, more _Magic_ come to take her family away, to upend her life—Lily’s friend smiles at her. “Good! I’ll be seeing you soon then.”

Petunia hopes she won’t.

The woman says goodbye to the boy, gives him a phone number and tells him to “be well, Harry. Be well.”

She leaves, and Petunia closes the door behind her.

Petunia cleans Dudley’s bedroom. She cleans the master bedroom. Then the bathrooms. The kitchen. The cupboard. There isn’t time to begin washing the walls before she has to start dinner, so she doesn’t. Vernon and Dudley return, and they have dinner.

Petunia makes a plate and takes it up to the second bedroom while Vernon smokes a pipe in his chair.

She knocks twice on the door and says “food, boy,” briskly before leaving it outside on the floor and returning downstairs to start on dishes. She ignores the slowly opening door behind her.

-:-:-:-

Two summers later, when Dudley is twelve, she says nothing when Dudley hides a book inelegantly behind his back. She recognises it as a ‘muggle’ book, one she read for English class in highschool, that had a wizard and dwarves and a dragon.

She snaps at Vernon to use an ashtray if he’s going to smoke indoors, or he’ll clean the carpets himself.

She stuffs small bills into a hidden pocket she’s sewn into Dudley’s mattress cover when she makes the bed.

A summer after that, she speaks to a friend about writing a column for the tiny local newspaper.

The year her son turns fifteen, she has earned enough money through her column, has saved up enough from gardening awards and exemplary produce, all in an account her newspaper friend holds for her. She tells Vernon to leave. He doesn’t, so she does, and takes Dudley with her. When June comes, Harry joins them.

They move downtown, closer to her work at the magazine, a bigger column than the one in the tiny local paper. She writes on housekeeping efficiently, recipes, and living alone for women like her.

She keeps custody of Dudley in the divorce. She’s always had sole custody of Harry—Lily’s will stipulated that under no circumstances should Vernon have custody, but said little on Petunia herself. Vernon gets the house and the car, and the accounts. But she has her own small account that she takes ownership of when she leaves, and it turns out that Lily and that husband of hers set it up so that whoever had custody of Harry wouldn’t need to worry about paying for anything related to him. She’s still a single woman supporting her son and she doesn’t have a cushy sales job, but it’s enough.

By the time the boys turn sixteen, she is happier than she ever was on Privet Drive. The apartment is smaller than the house was, three bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a small living room. It’s a lot less work to maintain, and Dudley enjoys vacuuming and sorting laundry once he gets the hang of it. He says he likes the methodicalness of it, and she is so proud.

By the time Harry and Dudley reach seventeen, Dudley has grown, and so has his mother. He learns. He makes a few friends downtown who verbally smack him upside the head when he slips up in his efforts to do better, and she is so very proud. He does contract work, heavy lifting things, and contemplates a trade. His mother smiles at him and says she's proud of him, when he awkwardly tells her maybe he'd like to start a gym, to teach self-defense. He and Harry renovate an old building when he's twenty, and starts teaching his friends. He goes to school and learns to teach, and starts classes for kids during the day. At night, the gym is open to anyone who needs a workout, and there are informal free night classes for adults. (On Thursdays the gym is closed to the public, except for the fireplace, when the boys teach a mixture of self-defense methods. They think they keep it a secret from her, but a mother knows.)

This is how he meets his wife, at a convention for martial arts and self defense instructors. She takes issue with his form, and he asks for a demo. She throws him down on the mats, and he grins. At 30 she finally accepts the ring he's been offering since they were 25, and at 34 he holds her hand as she curses him for it. He holds a beautiful baby in his arms a few hours later and she tells him never to ask her to do that again, but it was damn worth it. At 40, a harried and newly blue-haired Dudley will ring his cousin and ask about magical primary schools.

Petunia Evans will be at her grandchild's graduation, and will ask her grandchild just what this whole ‘ministry of magic’ thing is anyways over the dinner table. There's a jar filled with powder on the fireplace mantle at Grandmother Petunia's that sparkles and turns the fire green.

Vernon Dursley moves past his divorce and works in drills.

He works in drills his whole life.

He takes ownership of the drill manufacturing company one day, whose workers union will fight every second of every day for better pay, better hours, and safer working conditions.

He loses contact gradually with his son.

He loses the lawsuit for dangerous work environments.

He loses his job.

He loses.

He lives at Number Four Privet Drive still, the money he makes as a low-ranking drill salesman sustains him, but as his neighbours continue the fight for shiniest car and neatest lawn, he cannot keep up. He watches his prestige and his perfect life slip through his fingers, cursing every little thing he can blame for it, and does nothing to change course. His inaction is his downfall, and he loses. He dies a lonely death, wasting away of a disease in his lungs of some kind, a product of working at the drill manufacturing company and smoking all the while.

Vernon Dursley refused to learn, refused to grow, refused to change. And he loses.

**Author's Note:**

> many many many thanks to the impeccable [ @strikinghope,](https://strikinghope.tumblr.com/) without whom this would not be nearly so good as it is.   
> I'm [damnedtreasure](https://damnedtreasure.tumblr.com/), follow me for just the wildest assortment of things and occasional whinings about writer's block  
> Thanks for reading this fun spinoff of my own au!


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